I just finished a jog of four miles in 95º heat as a warmup for an 8-mile jaunt tomorrow and I feel pretty good about myself for it. This is something like the tenth week of my half-marathon training, and I can feel my knees starting to hate me -- especially since I also work a job where I am on my feet in uncomfortable shoes for 6-7 hours at a time. I am not signed up for a race and I am not really sure if I will be able to run the full 13.1 miles on the appointed day, but training has been a lot of fun and I've really started to love running.
This would have seemed impossible to me about four months ago, as I was out of shape and really hated running. But for whatever reason, a few months ago I decided I was tired of feeling fat and eating like crap. I wore my weight pretty well but my good metabolism was bound to betray me at some point and I wanted to avoid that before things got out of hand.
A few months later, I'd lost about 30 pounds (depending when you start counting from) and I've kept it off. I figure I should document this, not necessarily because I think I've done something revolutionary and I want to tell the world, but more for my own benefit five years from now when real life has caught up to me and I've put on weight and feel like crap again. So, for your enjoyment:
THE MOST AWESOME WEIGHT-LOSS PLAN EVERMy brother was getting really annoyed with me when I started shedding pounds because he had been trying to lose weight and hadn't. He asked me what I was doing and I told him: diet, and exercise. He had been doing neither, so I wasn't surprised that he hadn't lost weight. He ate whatever he wanted, including going out for fried chicken tenders and fries about three times a week, and never did anything physical. And really, in a way, my awesome weight-loss plan was that simple. Diet and exercise.
DietWhen I made the decision to start losing weight, I realized that I didn't really DO anything physical (more on that in a moment). Without using any complicated calorie calculators or keeping a food journal or anything, I was able to see that. I kept it simple and decided that I would just eat a lot less, and at least for breakfast and lunch, I would keep it mostly to fruit and yogurt. I was working a 9-5 desk job so controlling portions during the day was easy: If I didn't bring it to work, I couldn't eat it. I also tended to wake up really late so controlling breakfast portions was no problem -- usually all I had time to do was grab a banana on my way out the door and quickly throw together my fruit-and-yogurt lunch.
I also drank a lot of green tea during the day.
Most days, I would be starving when I got home. I'd grab a quick, very light snack if I knew I'd be eating late, or otherwise I'd just hold out until dinner. Dinner was a much larger meal, and I aimed for some kind of protein (meat and/or beans), carbohydrate (rice, potatoes, or pasta), and vegetable. I tried to control portions and just eat my fill, which actually became easier the less I ate and the more I got used to my diet. Even though consuming most of your calories in one large meal is supposedly the exact opposite of what you want to do when you're dieting,
I didn't have the restraint necessary to keep from eating big meals during the day, too. The moral there, I guess, is do what you need to do to keep from eating too much.
Most of the time, I'd have a glass of wine or two with or after dinner and maybe a SMALL bowl of ice cream. The nice thing was, portion control wasn't that hard because you actually remember what it feels like to be hungry, and of course, what it feels like to be full, instead of drifting all day in this nebulous "well, I COULD eat" phase (where you usually do, because why not).
I didn't deprive myself of foods I like, really, but I will say that after returning from Spain, really greasy and fatty food hasn't appealed to me that much. (The few fast-food burgers I have had in the 10 months since have left me feeling like I took a hook to the stomach from Sonny Holmes [yes, I know that's not a real boxer, but it makes sense to someone out there]). So that probably helped. But when I'd go out to eat, I'd just kind of eat whatever. I didn't go out a lot, but once a week I did go to my favorite bar in the Syracuse area and order a big ol' plate of "Scotchos" and chicken wings with one of my best friends, so there was that.
ExerciseI once heard that, when working out, you should "do what you hate the most." It might have been "do what you fear the most," but the message is the same either way because you would probably fear doing what you hate more than anything else.
I followed that advice and decided to try to start running. Any time I've ever belonged to or had access to a gym, it hasn't worked out because I've lacked the willpower to drive myself over there, shower after, change, etc. It's an ordeal. Running, though, is free. You can do it anywhere. You don't have to drive anywhere. You can shower in your own shower afterward and you can use your own towel. And you burn more calories per [time or distance unit of choice] than anything else. So I ran.
But part of the reason I chose to run was because I hate running. I had never run more than one mile in any one session, those miles were only done for school, and I had never finished in under about 8:45.
When I started running, I sucked. But I knew I sucked, so I decided to just run loops around my house. (I lived on a circular street about 0.4 miles in circumference.) I started slowly, trying to run a loop then walk a loop, doing as many as I could handle (or shooting for about 30-40 minutes) and making an effort to run at least as much as I walked. Over weeks, I crept up to run 1.5 loops walk 0.5 loops, and then I was trying to push myself by starting and ending my sessions with 2-loop runs. I was getting better but I never really thought I could do any sort of distance training (back to that soon).
I aimed to run three days a week, usually Monday/Wednesday/Friday but sometimes Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday. Whenever I did it, I tried to give myself a day's rest in between runs so I wouldn't get injured. (I should also mention I didn't kill myself trying to stretch every muscle in my body and simply stretched out a bit after my run, before I got in the shower.) On the other days, I sometimes took a short walk with my mom. I always, however, did pushups (and later, I added crunches as well). I started training with the
hundredpushups program around the same time I started running. The workouts don't take long. While it's months later and I've kind of fallen behind and still haven't "done the hundred," I do pushups and situps every week and it's a nice way to keep active and build muscle on the days I'm not running. I feel a lot stronger in my upper body, my biceps have grown, and my chest has gotten tighter.
Eventually, I went for a run with Resident Girl (returning from her hiatus as Girl and before she became Resident Girl) and she said that I seemed like I was in good enough shape to start training for a half-marathon using the same program she had successfully finished in the spring. So, I did, and since I had already been sort of working my way into it for about 6-8 weeks, it wasn't difficult to get into, even though I had never tried running much more than 0.8 miles prior to starting the program.
Honestly, that's about it.As I got into the training, I still ate well, and didn't eat as much as I used to, but I did recognize that as the runs got longer, I needed more calories in my body so I would eat slightly bigger lunches on run days (or carb-heavy dinners the nights before). Not that much more food, though. I would try to eat a piece of fruit in the afternoon a few hours before my run to give me some fuel (and as a snack to tide me over until dinner and give me some energy in the meantime). I still try to make healthy decisions, I don't drink that much, and I try not to eat out of the house as much as I used to. (Seriously, if you told me before I lost this weight that I'd be living within two miles of a McDonald's, a Burger King, a Domino's, a Pizza Hut with lunch buffet, an all-you-can-eat Indian food buffet, a Chipotle, a Taco Bell, and a Wegmans with a sub shop, and that a month into living here, I'd only been to Chipotle twice and Taco Bell once, I would have laughed in your face. Most of that food doesn't appeal to me that much anymore.) I buy lots of veggies and fruit to munch on, I have cheap granola cereal with lowfat yogurt most days for breakfast, and I snack on chips and hummus.
I'm out of gas here and need to shower before work, but I'm glad I got this on the record so I can kick my fat ass back into shape five years from now.
